Chapter 13: Whale
Under the beam of the flashlight, in the last moment before that massive silhouette vanished, Zhang Wenda saw a row of things flying up.
It was a row of five black Go pieces.
Or rather, they weren’t Go pieces—they were five eyes in a line, the eyes of the Youth Center.
The view outside the window gradually became covered in soil again, but Zhang Wenda stood frozen, unable to calm down for a long time.
The scene just now lingered in his mind—the Youth Center was alive, it was a living thing.
This world, he understood, was strange, but what he didn’t understand was why an underground building could move.
Yet Zhang Wenda did not feel surprised.
At this moment, he no longer had any interest in being surprised.
No matter how strange the world was, it didn’t matter anymore—because he understood he was about to die.
The Youth Center was alive, and it was sinking deeper into the ground with them inside.
The rising temperature and lack of oxygen made it clear—they were already very, very far from the surface.
There was no longer any possible exit from the Youth Center.
Even if there was a door, the pressure from the surrounding soil would crush them to death.
As for Teacher Rabbit, it was impossible for him to save them.
If he had the ability, he would have saved them long ago—there was no way he’d be dawdling until now.
Zhang Wenda’s body slumped slowly to the ground, almost scraping the wall, his eyes full of deep despair.
Suddenly, he lowered his head and laughed, a self-deprecating laugh.
“What the hell is up with me anyway? Clumsily transported back here, then beaten up by who-knows-what, and now dying in an underground pit hundreds of meters deep?”
He had thought this was just the beginning.
Unexpectedly, it was already the end.
Recalling the lofty ambitions he had when he first returned, he couldn’t help but feel inexplicably mocked.
“Maybe I actually died in that rented room back then, and this is Heaven’s way of telling me that death was too easy, so I get a different kind of death instead?”
“Sigh...” Zhang Wenda lay flat on the ground and let out a deep sigh.
The black cat beside him paced back and forth on his chest a few times before sitting directly on him.
“Thanks, kitty. Thanks for letting me understand before I died.”
Zhang Wenda began to feel short of breath.
He even felt like he was on the verge of fainting.
Just as he was drifting into unconsciousness, he suddenly heard someone calling him.
“Mouse!”
“Wenda! Don’t be afraid, we came to save you!”
A hand reached out from the darkness, shooed away the black cat, and with a lot of fumbling and pulling, helped him up from the ground.
Very soon, someone picked up the flashlight and turned it back on, revealing a group of sweaty faces.
They were his classmates—each face filled with concern.
“Fatty, why are you guys here? Didn’t you listen to the teacher and stay put?” Zhang Wenda asked, looking ashen.
“We’re buddies! You saved my life once, remember? There’s no way I’d ignore you just because the teacher said so. I’m not that kind of disloyal person!” Fat Deadbeat said while carrying Zhang Wenda on his back.
The classmates nearby formed a circle, waving their schoolbags nervously to drive away the hissing black cat.
Watching their movements, Zhang Wenda felt a sudden warmth in his heart.
It had been a long time since anyone had cared about him this sincerely.
The same group who had cried in terror before had now come searching for him in the dark.
He knew this must have been very difficult for them.
Looking at their young, innocent faces, a surge of energy suddenly welled up inside him.
“I won’t give up. I absolutely can’t give up. It doesn’t matter if I die—but what about them? These kids’ lives are just beginning. They can’t just die here like this!”
Zhang Wenda suddenly jumped down from Fat Deadbeat’s back, startling Pan Dongzi.
“Mouse, are you okay?”
“Let’s go! All of you, come with me! I’ll lead you back home!” Zhang Wenda shouted, gritting his teeth as he headed toward the remaining rooms.
He knew they were already hundreds of meters underground—but still, he had to try!
Each door was opened.
Each classroom was more bizarre and grotesque than the last.
But Zhang Wenda never gave up.
Even when they reached the Aeromodelling Room, filled with noxious gases, he clenched his teeth and kept searching.
What if? What if there was a portal or something?
This world was so strange—anything was possible!
To find an exit, he used every possible means.
He even had the cat accompany them.
Whenever they opened a door, they sent it in first to scout around, hoping for a miracle.
By the time the digital watch on Fat Deadbeat’s wrist hit 6:30, Zhang Wenda, now struggling to breathe, finally stopped.
There was no portal.
The black cat hadn’t found any way out either.
Looking at his classmates who were now slumping one by one against the walls, Zhang Wenda still refused to give up.
He wiped the sweat off his face and forced himself to stand again.
“I haven’t given up yet. I can’t give up! I’ll go over it one more time!”
“Mouse, let’s just stop searching, okay? Let’s go back and wait like the guide says. Teacher Rabbit will definitely come save us.”
Just as Fat Deadbeat finished speaking, Zhang Wenda, who was about to leave, suddenly stopped.
When he slowly turned around and looked at Fat Deadbeat, there was a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why do we have to follow the guide’s rules?”
“Because everything in there is correct—adults thought it through.”
“The thing is—I am an adult.”
Zhang Wenda pulled out his Youth Center guide and began going over the bizarre rules one by one.
“Why must we follow those rules? Why are they always right?”
Why pretend not to see when you spot black Go pieces in the Chess Room?
Why leave the classroom when there are more than three pieces?
Why tell the teacher when there are more than five?
Why report strange feelings in the Aeromodelling Room?
Why tell a classmate if a pit appears?
Why must we avoid falling into the Calligraphy Room’s pit?
At the brink of life and death, a thought was stirring in Zhang Wenda’s mind, trying to break free—but he still couldn’t grasp it.
He had never questioned this before.
He had always accepted this world as bizarre, where anything could happen.
But now, thinking with an adult’s perspective, he realized these rules weren’t random—they followed some hidden logic.
Some hopeful logic.
“Pen? Who has a pen?!”
Hearing Zhang Wenda’s shout, someone handed him a pencil that had fallen into their schoolbag.
Drenched in sweat, Zhang Wenda quickly began categorizing all the rules in the Youth Center guide.
He discovered they roughly fell into two categories.
One category helped avoid danger—like warning classmates about cracks in the Aeromodelling Room floor or pits in the Calligraphy Room.
These could be ignored.
The other category involved anomalies—like seeing five black pieces in a row in the Chess Room, feeling strange emotions in the Aeromodelling Room, or spotting mysterious creatures in the Youth Center.
Deep underground, Zhang Wenda stared blankly at his scribbled-on Youth Center guide.
As the sinking continued, oxygen inside the Youth Center grew scarcer.
Everyone was suffocating.
Even Zhang Wenda’s lips were turning purple.
Yet he seemed unaware, staring fixedly at the rules in front of him, desperate to find a way out.
Suddenly, the hand holding the pencil moved and drew a big circle around the final section of the organized rules.
Eliminating all the risk-avoidance rules, he found that all the remaining ones had the same final solution—tell Teacher Rabbit and let him handle it.
Then, inspiration struck, and he blurted out a single sentence.
“Something’s wrong!”
“What?!” Fat Deadbeat, who had fainted, woke up momentarily and fainted again.
“There’s a contradiction! Something’s not right. Some of these rules are overkill! There’s even one reminding us not to trip over a tiny hole in the Aeromodelling Room. Rabbit can’t possibly care about us that much!”
“If he really cared, he wouldn’t send us to such a dangerous place to collect living material. This is no different from using child labor as miners! The death rate is too high!”
Zhang Wenda’s words flowed faster and faster as he pointed out the contradiction, his eyes shining with clarity.
He remembered those individual black Go pieces in the Chess Room—and the row of eyeballs that made up the Youth Center.
“So there’s only one possibility: all the Youth Centers we were sent to collect from in the past were dead!”
“Not sleeping, not inactive—dead!”
“Only dead Youth Centers would be safe enough for children like us to harvest from!”
“Only those places would be called Youth Centers!”
At this moment, Zhang Wenda finally grasped the idea that had been flickering in his mind.
“There were never any nonsensical rules! Every single rule follows a logical purpose!”
The only conscious student nearby—the short bespectacled kid—adjusted his glasses and asked, “So what does that mean?”
Zhang Wenda looked out the window at the slowly shifting soil.
Based on its color and texture, he could now say it wasn’t soil—it was rock.
He watched the sliding rock outside and remembered the giant silhouette in the underground cavern—and the general behavior of the Youth Center.
“The living sink. The dead rise. You know, I once read about a creature that’s the opposite—a whale.”
“When a whale dies, it slowly sinks to the ocean floor. Once there, its flesh feeds all sorts of sea life. One whale’s fall brings life to ten thousand creatures.”
The white Go pieces they had once collected, the Liquid Joy, the other Youth Center—all the things he’d noticed or missed came flooding into Zhang Wenda’s mind.
And at that moment, his eyes grew even brighter.
“I’m saying—what if the Youth Center *is* a whale?”
“A kind of underground whale that lives beneath the earth?”
“And when it dies, it rises under pressure, eventually reaching the surface, where its body nourishes us surface-dwellers?”